The Zalan Bolt

By Celesta Starr

The wondrous planet Zalan, lying far beyond the brim of known space, has but one detriment to its unprecedented beauty: the shockingly unpredictable, raging-red lightning storms that spawn the murderous fiery bolt able to fell any unprotected man, beast, or home.
It is on a night when one such storm rages that a stranger arrives at the Tavern on the Hill, in Zalan’s old world sector. A sinister, deadly, fascinating stranger, who rashly mocks the screaming bolt and wakes old, primeval superstitions and fears, and new nameless dreads, in the locals gathered at the hearth.
The stranger also holds the lovely, gentle, innocent daughter of the innkeeper in special thrall. He lures her along dark, forbidden paths to an exquisitely evil, unhallowed place, where beguiling dreams are deviously entwined with nightmares. It is here that she is to be terribly transformed, and where an unimaginable fate is waiting for her, her loved ones, and eventually... the entire planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Jul 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781528986847

Celesta Starr

Writing has always been a part of Celesta’s life. She started when she was only seven years old and hasn’t stopped since. Whereas other people may have travelled around the world, to amazing and far-off places, Celesta has travelled into her mind to places more intriguing than them all. She had access to vast vistas of wonder and endless thrilling challenges. She had the ability to create characters and bring them to life. The biggest thrill of all being the countless situations where she could have limitless scope. She has travelled inestimably far. She couldn’t do anything else but write. She wouldn’t do anything else.

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Writing has always been a part of Celesta’s life. She started when she was only seven years old and hasn’t stopped since.

Whereas other people may have travelled around the world, to amazing and far-off places, Celesta has travelled into her mind to places more intriguing than them all. She had access to vast vistas of wonder and endless thrilling challenges. She had the ability to create characters and bring them to life. The biggest thrill of all being the countless situations where she could have limitless scope.

She has travelled inestimably far.

She couldn’t do anything else but write.

She wouldn’t do anything else.

Celesta Starr

The Zalan

Bolt

Copyright © Celesta Starr 2023

The right of Celesta Starr to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781528986830 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781528986847 (EPub-e-Book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd

1 Canada Square

Canary Wharf

London

E14 5AA

To Theo

He arrived on the night of the Red Lightning bolt, when no sane man, or the most suicidal and reckless one, would dare to venture out.

Nobody knew where he came from… Nobody wanted to know.

‘Do not go out tonight, my friend,

When the skies really rage in revolt.

Do not go out – to never return,

For the Dreaded Zalan bolt.’

(3rd Seer. Terrian)

Translation from old Yalskrid

Chapter 1

Hell Night

The first time they saw him, the peaceable inhabitants of the unique old-world Sector of the unusual planet Zalan, was that appalling night in the first ira of Spring.

It was the night when the fearful red lightning storm raged the worst for some years, with the deadly circular red bolt giving its awful high-pitched scream every few minutes. These alarming storms, peculiar to Zalan, were the only things that marred the most beautiful and interesting planet in the exclusive Del-Thynne System, although, admittedly, they did keep it from being overrun by ‘Utopia’ seekers. People visited; yes, thousands of them at all seasons, to see the rare wonders. But they were never tempted to permanently reside with the tempests of renown.

He came out of the bizarre, red-black, howling hell night, like he was a wildly reckless, rejoicing, radiant part of it. Like the shrieking wind, and deluging red-tinged rain, the ground and walls quaking thunder, and the sky scorching, blinding crimson lightning, with its spawned blazing bolt, presented the flaunting, flouting pride of his own strange strength and power, and the darkly shining glory of his aristocratic, but ambiguous, inheritance.

He came as he was to be. That mesmerising, marvellous, malevolent mystery.

Soletra – the lovely, lissom daughter of the proprietor of the Galactic Inn – was to set her wondering, luminous, lime-green eyes on him before anybody else. In the general startlement at the authoritative more than imperative banging on the door – surely, nobody should be that insane, or luckless to be out there – the girl of 17 summers went to answer the loud summons on thick granite wood, being the nearest to it. She opened the door of the charming, old-fashioned tavern as much as she dared for the furies of the elements. Even then, there was more than enough of a roaring, splashing entry, fit to knock her over and drench her.

Soletra flinched, and shivered, and blinked hard to see through the flailing wind, and lashing, sanguineous rain. Her ears winced at the deafening thunder with no sturdy masonry in-between, if haply it was the re-gathering lull with the lightning child. The brief abatement of its scream that could shatter any sound, and the bravest hearts of men. Soletra, blinking to clear her gaze of the rain like cold tears on it, was thoroughly prepared for the sorry sight of a scared witless, half-dead traveller, who certainly had to be ailing from madness or misfortune. You were never otherwise abroad, especially in the country regions, on these nights.

The Zalan storms, with their slaying bolts, were no more spoken of carelessly than they were faced, however great the courage or the rashness of the individual. The Zalan population themselves did, in particular, healthily fear and respect their terrible legacy from that freak of nature eluding remedy and restraint. The locals at the inn tonight demonstrated this. The current motley selection of faithful patrons had arrived before the storm, which could often strike with no hint of warning, and instant ferocity from serene, calm skies. And every hardy fellow was staying unbudgeably safe in tavern seats, with the soothing Ratzen ale and tobacco, until the wrath was over, able to go as quickly as it had started.

He was a traveller alright, Soletra saw, when she could. But he wasn’t half dead! Not by any means. He was absolutely animated, and spectacular in just wetness and dishevel. He had intensely impactive, lively, artful eyes that were as vividly red as the lightning and could similarly flash. His heedlessly uncovered hair, curling with the wet, was red and vibrant, falling long about him in riotously rippling reams that could have been living flame. His body, concealed by a profusion of some odd type of cloak as it was, effectively – nigh bristlingly – conveyed its drama of activity, its dynamo of energy, through the blackest fabric swatches tinged with red, like the night, and with a sinister, three-dimensional shine beyond the rain slick.

What! Nobody could look more alive!

And scared witless he wasn’t. There was only this glowing exhilaration and elation. Rather, he was the more scaring, in that majestic, magnificent fashion.

He stood haughtily, valley tree taller and straighter, on the flogged, teeming threshold. The rain beat like tiny angry drums on the singular stuff of his cloak, and ran the reflecting red into the black, and vice versa. He threw his regal head airily and exultantly back, with the lengthy, fiery corkscrewing of hair soddenly and stupendously sweeping behind it. Simultaneously, the very lightning seemed to strike from those eyes that had its hot pigment. So intense and electrical was the flash, it could have been borrowed from the 30 sizzling prongs branding this night. It fairly sparked along his red curling lashes, and brightly lit up the whole of his face, stamping its every feature grandly and graphically out on the stormy hues and havoc.

Soletra, in her dazed and jolted recoil, had never seen such a face. Zalan men were reputedly as attractive as the women, being nicely rugged and imposing, with their lavish, lustrous, vari-braided hair and slim, sturdy physique. But they were as plain and dowdy as the Mala bird, compared with this stranger, wherever he was from; it wasn’t from here or any near, familiar planet. The face she stared widely at in her frightened thrill and thrall could have been the work of a master sculptor. It was handsome beyond words and belief, with its flawless symmetry and smooth, youthful but age-indeterminable skin, like pale, translucent Castel marble.

She drank in the divine details with nervously smitten gulps from a bottomless chalice. The lordly sloping temples. The boldly winging red brows over the devastating eyes, further revealing their exotically slanting shape and sultry, ochre lids. The noble nose curving quick, impetuous nostrils. The chiselled, extra strong jaw, with the throbbing dream of a mouth that was excitingly winning and warning, in its limitless allure.

But Soletra had never seen anybody like him before. Full stop! She had never envisioned anybody like him. Not in the most unbridled flights of a young girl’s fancy. She recoiled again on the wetter spot, with more assembling sensations than she knew what to do about – and a majority of them she didn’t know at all. As if things, that had slumbered deep, hidden and totally unsuspected of in the shy, sweet, docile interior of her, had been shaken hard awake in a single, stunning instant.

From his flame rivers of hair to his muddy-booted, active, dominant tread, he seemed next to strike as much as the lightning in his eyes or the genuine article in the berated, weeping skies. He could have been more than six foot of live voltage, sending little shocks, each of them ablaze, through Soletra, and practically fusing her in her rebound to the floor, where she was becoming more than ever hazardously exposed to the Celestial tempest.

The stranger smiled sardonically at Soletra’s overt reaction to him. But there was a more stirringly sensual side to the smile, and his fire eyes, with the spark-skimming lashes, had their interest of the whetting stone of that sensuality for the lovely, tremulous, transfixed obstacle in his path. Then, in his continuing blatant disregard for bigger hazards from the wicked weather, he performed the graceful bow that owed more to mockery and scorn than actual courtesy, and spoke over another ominously building thunder roll, through crimson flash and wind and rain pound.

Well, my pretty. As a long, lone traverser on foot, may I not step into your humble, but presently welcome abode? Or must we both be hacked to pieces by the gale, drowned by the downpour or hit by the re-birthing bolt?

His voice suited his formidably fascinating, fervid attraction, that rippled a hundred more known and unknown thrills strung on jolts through the bemazed Soletra. Never had she heard such a voice. Efficiently versed in the Zalan language, discounting a lilt of an intriguing accent, it was a many coloured voice. It was melodiously clear as vedellan crystal, immersed in the flame of his eyes, but catching on colder blades, low in shades spelling ‘beware’; yet silk soft, and pulsant, and rich, and mellow as the Worship bell, with its same way of carrying far in stillness and storm. As it was